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She earned her PhD in string theory at 26. Then she wrote a novel about physics. Dr. Tasneem Zehra Husain. Born in Lahore. Theoretical physicist. Writer. Educator. BSc in mathematics and physics from Kinnaird College, Lahore. A master's in physics from Quaid-i-Azam University. A PhD in theoretical physics from Stockholm University in 2003, with Ansar Fayyazuddin as her advisor. Pakistan's first female string theorist, and as the first Pakistani woman to earn a PhD in string theory. She has said she was fascinated by the idea that all the diversity of matter and forces in the universe could arise from the vibrations of tiny strings. After PhD she did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She came home to help set up the School of Science and Engineering at LUMS, SBASSE, and was a founding faculty member. She has also taught mathematics and physics at her alma mater, Kinnaird College. She represented Pakistan at the Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany. She led the Pakistan team to the World Year of Physics launch conference in Paris. She helped train Pakistan's team for the International Physics Olympiad. November 2014. Her first novel, Only the Longest Threads, was published. It retells the great breakthroughs of physics, from classical mechanics to string theory, through fictional witnesses to those moments. One of its settings is Lahore. Kirkus Reviews called it a fictional approach that captures both the substance of the theory and the passion of its practitioners. She has been a regular columnist for 3 Quarks Daily and has spoken at the Boston Book Festival, the Cambridge Science Festival and How The Light Gets In. She is President of the Pakistan section of the International Board on Books for Young People, a Fellow at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, a visitor at Imperial College London's Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics, and an Ambassador for the Island of Knowledge in Tuscany. She studies the universe's smallest strings. She tells its biggest stories. Tasneem Zehra Husain Pakistan Zindabad 🇵🇰